Here are a few shots from the Jan 19th Dark Horse Bouldering Finals, a climbing competition staged at the MetroRock Climbing Center in Everett, Massachusetts.

Some but not all of the amazing women who threw down during this exciting night of climbing theater!

Isabelle Faus:

Galina Parfenov:

Molly Gaynor:

Angie Payne:

Meagan Martin:

…all moving like dancers on a vertical stage.

It was amazing to watch and photograph, even though I wasn’t happy with my take-home. I went two days early to scope out the venue, assure my shooting stances and determine which lens would work best – climbing gyms are reeeeeeally dusty environments, and changing lenses isn’t a great idea.

But when I showed up for the comp, most of the stances I’d been “given” were occupied by the video crew, as was the overhead access between stances. I was stuck in one spot, with a lens which only worked for one of the three problems.

We got a fresh inch of snow overnight, not enough to shovel, just enough to freshen up the older snow pack. And with a daytime high in the ‘teens assuring clear, crisp air, it seemed like a good time to scout some river scenes.

I headed up the Cold river a bit after noon, beneath blue skies and scuttling clouds:

The valley is still a tangled mess from Irene, but winter disguises her scars.

I’ve always liked the way tumbling rivers look when they rise up around snow covered rocks, saturating their marsh mallow hats, turning them into emerald slushies, washing them down river like slow moving ghosts. This cold weather grows the well-anchored ones into wonderful ice islands:

The wind was brutal, and after an hour of walking the river bank, my fingers had had enough, despite my beefy gloves, and I headed back to the car, noticing on my way down river that the moon was rising. At the car I put Gizmo and his little buddy Tele on the box and got this:

I packed it in, cranked the heat and ran a few errands.

My day ended with a drive home along the Deerfield river, where I snagged this shot of the frazil ice building it’s tortuous tangle as the sun disappeared behind the near hills:

That one’s from Elliot, with a degree and a half of tilt and a hand-held three-stop graduated ND filter. It took me all of fifteen minutes, by the end of which my tripod had frozen into the river, my fingertips were wooden and I had wind-whipped tears frozen to my cheeks.

Good thing I spent all those years climbing ice, or I wouldn’t have enjoyed that one bit! 😉

Well that’s all for now, friends. I have 909 shots from last weekend’s climbing competition to process, so I’m off to work!

Here’s a shot I took a few days back, of a horse up in Stamford VT, just over the border from Clarksburg, MA. I posted it on Facebook (yeah, I’m being sucked over to the Dark Side) but neglected to blog it:

That’s the “fun shot,” but as serious photographs go, I like this one better:

This beautiful boy was hanging out way over by yonder barn when I called him in by gently, almost silently, telling him how beautiful he was.

Yeah, he might have just been curious about a movement over by the road, but then, there’s a LOT of movement over by the road.

And it makes great sense to me that animals would have retained many senses and sensibilities which We Humans have allowed to atrophy in favor of a more precisely communicable language.

To date, conjecture about animal communication has spawned a dearth of research, but provides grist for the mind-mill of musings about what exists beyond the horizon of our conscious appreciation.

I realize I’ve been largely absent from the blogosphere for the past week; I’m trying to build a photography website (no it’s not yet ready for viewing,) and the “common wisdom,” if one can conceive of such a thing in the Tea Party Era, is that a Facebook presence is key to any kind of commercial success, which I’m sorely in need of. So I’ve been posting more stuff there than here, for which I apologize to my faithful readers.

In defense of my slacker blog ethics, though, I’d like to point out that this is my 1800th post at Little Bang Theory. Thank you, friends, for keeping me going this long and far! 😉

Down in Hadley there’s a place I like to check out once in a while, a farm where American Bison are raised. They’re impressive beasts:

They’re big. In fact, the old bulls are HUGE.

And they take the job of protecting their calves seriously – don’t expect to sneak up on them unnoticed:

They’re majestic in the snow, and look totally at home in the winter weather.

These animals area raised for meat, and if you’re an omnivore, it would be hard to get better meat than this – grass-fed, roaming big fields, protected from predators (other than us.) I know some people object to the practice of people eating animals, but since it’s more common than not with people world-wide who can afford it, I have to conclude that there’s something of nature in it.

I’ve been trying to get a more blizzard-y photo of them, but they’re an hour’s drive away, and while that’s close for us “hill-town people,” it’s still a dicey drive in a heavy snow.